This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
Microparticles and nanoparticles can be used in a variety of applications, including biotherapeutics and vaccines, as well as biological sensors, optical devices and nanomotors, by way of non-limiting example. In recent years, nanoparticles have been developed to carry drugs for treatment of diseases like cancer and diabetes, but can also be used for a variety of other functions, including detecting disease. Nanoparticle-based therapeutics can be administered orally as a pill or an inhalant. However, nanoparticles need to have very particular shape, size and composition in order to successfully enter the blood stream or target the area of disease within a patient. Thus, precise control over the geometry and chemistry of multiphasic micro- and nano-particles is of importance for a wide range of applications including drug delivery, vaccines and inhalation biotherapeutics, and biological sensors, among others.
The production of uniformly sized micro- and nano-particles has been difficult and remained problematic for current manufacturing processes. The development of micro- or nano-particle synthesis techniques, which result in such particles having tightly controlled size, shape and composition remains a technical challenge. Further, in a bottom-up approach envisioned for building materials and devices of the future, it is necessary to develop precisely designed particles (building blocks) that can assemble in a preprogrammed manner to yield desired structures and properties. However, fabricated micro- or nanoparticles typically have a uniform distribution of all materials (isotropic). In order to design particles that self-assemble in a preprogrammed manner, it is important to control the size, shape, and distribution of dissimilar materials within each particle to form anisotropic particles, such as Janus, tri-phasic, or quad-phasic particles. Although, many different routes for synthesizing such multiphasic particles have been explored previously, it would be desirable to develop a simple, inexpensive technique for the fabrication of monodisperse, multiphasic particles of any desired composition and size, with precise control over particle geometry.